Advice from Laurell K. Hamilton

In the April 2008 issue of Writer’s Digest, there is an interview with Laurell K. Hamilton, creator of the Anita Blake, vampire slayer series. It is a quite interesting interview; I didn’t realize that she had been in a writing program and was kicked out for being a bad influence (basically she was writing genre fiction and her class mates started to follow her lead, rather than writing the stuff that the dean of the program thought should be written).

Laurell K. Hamilton, near the end of the interview (done by Maria Scheider) said something that I found to be very meaningful.

“Writers write. Put your butt in the chair and write on a regular basis. Ray Bradbury said, ‘The muse cannot resist a working writer.’ I start off by writing why I can’t write. Type every reason you can’t write. Complain, bitch, whatever. Half a page to a page in, the muse says, ‘Well, if you’re going to be writing anyway, you can do better than this.’ Also, if you don’t protect your time, no one will. I wrote my first book two pages a day, five days a week.”

I think that it is good advice. I could be wrong. It may just look like useful advice because she mentions the muse. And that automatically gets my attention lately, considering that I am reading both (the) Iliad and Paradise Lost. Both Homer and John Milton mentioned the muse(s), having prayers to them. Their mention of the muses has started me researching a possible lecture on them for Bast Temple (Golden Dawn in Denver, Colorado).